‘Gavin got his groove back.’ How Newsom’s fight with Trump broke his moderate mirage

Gov. Gavin Newsom had become nearly unrecognizable to the Democratic Party. 

With President Donald Trump’s resurgence and the Democratic Party’s resounding defeat in the November 2024 election, Newsom has in recent months worked strategically to shed his progressive roots and rebrand himself as a moderate. 

He welcomed controversial MAGA figures such as Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon onto his podcast in an effort to court younger, more conservative male voters. On multiple occasions, Newsom referred to the Democratic brand as “toxic” and ridiculed his party’s policy priorities as out of touch. And in a conversation with Kirk, the governor seemed to agree with the GOP’s position that the participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports is “deeply unfair.”

Along the way, Newsom avoided publicly sparring with Trump — a major shift from the prominent resistance role he played during the president’s first term, when California sued the Trump administration more than 100 times. 

But that moderate mirage seemed to have broken Sunday, when Trump deployed 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles in response to protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and arrests in the city. 

Within hours, Newsom seemed to transform back into a Democratic firebrand.

Newsom decried Trump’s order as an abuse of federal powers intended to provoke a “manufactured crisis” in Los Angeles. He announced a lawsuit, filed Monday, seeking to block the Trump administration’s “takeover” of a state militia in what he has described as a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution. 

On Monday morning, Trump endorsed the idea that Newsom should be arrested for interfering with ICE raids, which the governor in a social media post called “an unmistakable step toward authoritarianism.” 

“Get it over with. Arrest me, move on,” Newsom, who traveled to Los Angeles to coordinate the state’s emergency response, said in an interview with MeidasTouch. “If you need some head to scalp, do it with me.” 

After months of carefully avoiding a major brawl with Trump, Newsom is done with the pleasantries. The president, he said, is a “stone-cold liar” who can’t be trusted. 

“I’ve tried to have an open hand with him. Tried to work with him. You can’t work with Donald Trump. You can only work for him,” Newsom said in an interview with the progressive YouTube host Brian Tyler Cohen. “And I will not — I refuse — to work for Donald Trump.” 

Newsom’s pivot to the middle had confused many Democrats who expected — and hoped — that he would resume a prominent resistance role against Trump, even as most saw his shift as a strategic first step to moderating his liberal image ahead of a 2028 presidential run.

After months of disappointment, those same Democrats celebrated the return of Newsom’s grittier side. 

“It appears that Gavin got his groove back,” Lorena Gonzalez, chief officer of the California Labor Federation, said in a text to The Standard. “And I’m here for it.” 

“We’ve seen the collaborator in chief transition in one night to the resistor in chief,” said Eric Jaye, a San Francisco Democratic strategist and Newsom’s former campaign manager. “That might give some people whiplash, but I think largely what we saw is somebody rising to the occasion.” 

It may also be that Newsom had no choice but to take up arms.

Trump’s military orders and the corresponding protests in Los Angeles “have forced [Newsom] back to being the leader of the resistance,” said Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump Republican strategist based in California. “I think Gavin Newsom realizes he is in a corner, and he has no choice but to fight, and this may just be a wake-up call for Democrats nationally who have been trying to figure out a way to work differently and are realizing the only way to do this is to fight their way out of it.” 

And like any good politician, Newsom doesn’t let an opportunity go to waste. 

The governor blasted out an email to supporters Sunday, using the conflict as a chance to solicit donations for his political action committee, Campaign for Democracy, while leveraging social media as his weapon against critics across the country. 

Jon Fleischman, a Republican campaign strategist based in Southern California, said Newsom’s response to the protests and his escalating fight with Trump underscores how the governor “makes all of his decisions through a political lens.” 

“At the end of the day, I’m sure there are some sincere, heartfelt beliefs inside of him, but they’re all subordinated to his political calculus,” Fleischman said. 

Jaye agreed that Newsom has something to gain politically from his clash with Trump, and that voters could rightfully question whether they should trust this latest iteration as more authentic than the man who was recently “pursuing his bromance with the MAGA right.” 

“It’s fair to ask, of these two Gavin Newsoms, which one is the truest?” Jaye said. “I suspect the governor we saw [Sunday] is closer to the core truth.”